Cahaya’s Rants

The three Indonesians sentenced to die for the 2002 Bali blasts say that they are ready to be executed and their only regret is that Muslims were among the 202 killed in the attack.Imam Samudra and the brothers Mukhlas and Amrozi are held at the top-security Batu prison, off the southern coast of Java. They were allowed to meet relatives yesterday in what is likely to be the last such visit before they face a firing squad, probably within the next two months.Amrozi became known as the smiling bomber because of his constant grin during his trial. “People ask me, why am I smiling? I am happy because I will be united with 72 angels in heaven,” he said in an interview with Reuters and a local television network. “I have killed many with my bombs. I have been tested by spending time in this prison, but if you make infidels angry you will be rewarded.”

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“We have no regrets at all,” Mukhlas said. “The Bali bombing was intended to uphold the divine order. My brother Amrozi was visited by a dead friend in a dream last night, who told him that a flying creature with a golden saddle is waiting to take him to heaven. This is why we will not ask for pardon. This is about heaven and hell. Asking for pardon is a big sin.”

Full story here.

No regrets. It is a divine order. That is why Islamists like Muklas cannot be ignored. If we do, we do it at our peril. We cannot underestimate the willingness of those who believe that their killing is divinely inspired, to kill more.

The former mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrema Sabri, has made the claim that there never was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall was really part of a mosque.”There was never a Jewish temple on Al-Aksa [the mosque compound] and there is no proof that there was ever a temple,” he told The Jerusalem Post via a translator. “Because Allah is fair, he would not agree to make Al-Aksa if there were a temple there for others beforehand.”

Sabri rejected Judaism’s claim to the Western Wall as part of the outer wall of the Second Temple.

“The wall is not part of the Jewish temple. It is just the western wall of the mosque,” he said. “There is not a single stone with any relation at all to the history of the Hebrews.”

Source: Jerusalem Post

To people like this former mufti, History is just an inconvenience. Worse. History can be ignored totally, and you can give your version of History. A version that has no basis, no foundation, not based on reality.

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Muslim women in niqabs or burqas will no longer be allowed to stay veiled when voting in Canada, under government legislation introduced on Friday. The bill seeks to force the hand of Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand, who rebuffed a request by a parliamentary committee that he require the lifting of veils to prove voters’ identities. He had insisted the existing law did not require this.The new legislation would allow an exception only for someone whose face is bandaged after surgery or covered for other medical reasons.

The issue has become a hot potato especially in the province of Quebec, which is debating how far to accommodate minorities, and where the provincial electoral officer reversed course last March and required the unveiling of voters.

If everybody else has to show his or her face to prove his or her identity, why should some people be exempted? If these burqa clad women object to males seeing their faces, then find a female voting worker verify if they are who they claimed themselves to be on voting day.

For Kavelle Thorne, the most challenging part of wearing a hijab for the first time was figuring a way to get the earphones for her MP3 player on without dislodging the bright pink scarf covering her hair.

Luckily, Sajda Khalil, a veteran hijabi and organizer of the National Hijab Day initiative at the University of Toronto, was on hand. “You have to go under the scarf, not on top” she said, laughing.

Thorne, a third-year Caribbean studies student, was one of 70 non-Muslim women at U of T to take part in the cross-country initiative to encourage an understanding of the everyday experiences of a hijab-wearing Muslim woman.

Overall, those experiences are the same as any other woman, said Khalil. While most women face relatively few incidents of overt racism in multicultural Toronto, Muslim women on campus have been targeted in the past.

The Toronto Star Story

Silly women! As if wearing a hijab (or tudung as they are called in Malaysia) for a day is going to make a lot of difference. Try wearing it for a year and see if you like feeling like you have to cover your head. The Muslim women wear the head covering because their religion requires it of them. For modesty.

That’s Islam for you. A religion with a mind set stuck in the 7th century. Every part of a woman’s body except for the face and palms has to be covered, because everything else is considered too sexy, too alluring, that they must be kept hidden. It is the woman’s fault if they get sexually assaulted because they did not help the men to control their libido by not covering themselves up. How backward!

And for the Canadian students who participated in the National Hijab Day? Yes they were showing solidarity with the Muslim women, solidarity in their oppression.